I can get new caps from Japan, and they probably would be $50ea shipped, but at the back of my mind, I've always thought "but yeah, one day soon I'll put in bigger brakes and get a new master cylinder anyway."

Of course I've been saying this for 4yrs now

..and while it's all apart, I'll paint the booster, make up new hardlines, blah blah bla

I've been following this build for a while as a guest, and I thought it was finally time to register.Kev, I'm amazed by your determination to get this car running perfectly. I'm sure that most people wouldn't have bothered doing the little things like the hole in the firewall, but it's the little things that matter.I'm in Sydney too, and I'd love to see the car around. When's the next show you're going to?

I started out with 600R, and it was waaay too soft. I basically followed the "Suzuka" spring set that Rubber-Soul sells, which IIRC is 275/1100. Pretty nice balance, still a little softer in the rear than the front, but the car seems to be happy with that.

Recently, I've noticed a little coolant weep between cylinder 4 and 5, about here. You can't see it now, but sometimes there's a little droplet right there:

Now just over a year ago, the head gasket blew at the racetrack, and it looked like this:

Not wanting to have a repeat of this, I tried to think of reasons why there might be a bit of a leak there, and a friend suggested that maybe I should try retorquing the head. Well you never know...so first the strut brace and the throttle cable have to come off.

Then the rocker cover can be removed...

And everything under there looks as it should, after 15,000kms, Tony Knight's handiwork on the head still looks new...in the middle of the pic you'll notice the 12-point nut for the ARP head stud kit that I fitted last year. We'll be loosening these, and retightening them again.

One of the possible theories is that maybe my Old Faithful Torque Wrench isn't so accurate anymore. That's the one at the top of this pic (which is the common kind that everyone has). I've had it for about 20yrs now, and during that time it's been abused and never been recalibrated. You see, this kind of wrench relies on an internal coil spring and various spring loaded gubbins inside, and over time they can lose their accuracy and need to be calibrated.

But the new one is a really nice, aussie-made Warren & Brown unit, which is reassuringly oldschool. Basically it simply relies on its shaft bending under torque when you tighten a bolt.

To set the desired torque, you slide that black triangle thing back and forth, and the tighter the setting, the further to the right it goes (and hence the more the shaft has to bend). When that conical thing on the bottom touches the black triangle, it pops some internal spring loaded device and makes an audible click. So this kind can never go out of adjustment, as long as its used appropriately, and is a really nice thing to hold.

First, I loosen every head nut a 1/4 turn, starting with the ones at the firewall end. Then I loosen the ones at the radiator end, and work my way towards the middle (this is the sequence according to the factory manual).

Then, to retighten...do the opposite, and start in the middle and work outwards. I start off with tightening all of them in sequence to 40ft-lbs, and then do a second round to take it up to 60.

And the verdict? Well it seems that Old Faithful is perhaps not really all that faithful anymore, because 60 pounds on the old wrench actually turned out to be 40! With the new wrench, the nuts took almost an extra quarter of a turn tighter at 60ft-lbs. I'll keep an eye on that coolant weep, but I presume that clamping the head 50% tighter isn't going to hurt...and Old Faithful is now enjoying a well-earned retirement in the Garbage Bin of Shame

But while everything is apart, it's a good time to give the rocker cover a bit of spit and polish...

A nice torque wrench is ALWAYS a good investment. As a kid I bought a $20 torque wrench at a Harbor Freight store...I've never even taken it out of its box. I keep it around as a reminder not to skimp on tools.

Water from the roof gutters, runs into those pipes, which then go into these huge tanks that we use for washing cars, watering the garden etc.

Of course, I have no idea why the plumber couldn't have put the pipes on the *outside* of the building, but hey it's too late now

I've started hearing about this...the "green" movement is very popular in the States and even people who don't live in dry areas are adopting setups like these in an effort to lower their "carbon footprint."

...however Mom has started collecting rainwater for her garden and she's got a cool little system set up now. It's gotten me thinking. How do you purify the water? How do you get sufficient water pressure to wash a car?

It's gotten me thinking. How do you purify the water? How do you get sufficient water pressure to wash a car?

It got a little serious here in Sydney a few years ago, when there wasn't much rainfall for a long time, and the drinking water supplies almost ran out. So they had this rule, where you could only water your garden in this one hour window twice a week (or something).

And washing cars with a hose was forbidden, so you had to line up all these buckets of water to tip over the car (which probably used a ton more water than a hose, but I think it was mainly to make washing a car inconvenient for most ppl).

So installing rain tanks was necessary if you had a big garden and lots of cars that need washing, because if you were using rainwater, you could do whatever the hell you want The tanks run off a pump, so the water pressure at the hose is about the same as regular tap water. Also it's not purified so you can't drink it, it's only for washing cars and watering plants.

Of course, in recent years we've had so much rain that they lifted the restrictions on using tap water for washing cars